"They're Trying to George Floyd Me"

Today’s New York Times headlines include a nightmarish Russian airstrike on Ukraine and riots in Brazil, affirmative action on life support and how a romance author faked her death online. Biden gave an MLK speech today which they tell me was lackluster: I did not watch and do not care.

WaPo has linked George Santos to Russian oligarchs — because don’t all roads lead back to Russian oligarchs? — and also provides “9 facts about MLK that may surprise you.” Today is Martin Luther King day, after all, where we celebrate the life of a man likely murdered by the FBI with a performance of collective amnesia regarding what he believed and how people actually felt about him while he was alive.

Neither paper makes mention of Keenan Anderson, who is dead now. We have video of some of Anderson’s last moments on earth thanks to the LAPD. In this video, he begs police to stop tasing him. They do not. And now he’s dead.

“They’re trying to George Floyd me!” he screamed as they killed him and he was right but also very wrong. Thirteen days after George Floyd was murdered the streets were filled with protesters and buildings were on fire. People screamed his name in outrage and grief that could not be contained, night after night; the voices swelled and broke and died without an echo.

It has been thirteen days since Keenan Anderson was murdered but the streets are mostly clear. WaPo ran an article about the incident on January 12th, nine days after Anderson’s death, but the story didn’t even make the Post’s top 7 newsletter for the day. It was a big news day, you see: In-n-Out Burger is expanding into Tennessee.

There are some important differences between the Floyd and Anderson footage. Anderson does not die on the street but later, in the hospital, which provides some distance between the tasing and the death that tasing caused. The LAPD released footage of Anderson from before the assault started and so we can see that Anderson did not follow instructions and at one point tried to leave the scene of the car accident. 

The biggest difference, however, is that Keenan Anderson died in an age where the sentence “They’re trying to George Floyd me!” exists. Floyd was the last Black man to die at the hands of the police when it did not.

Once upon a time it was impossible that an airplane could bring down a skyscraper, much less an American one. Impossible, also, that a global pandemic could kill so many and transform politics and culture so completely. Impossible that the Capitol building could be breached. That the Berlin wall could fall.

Until recently it was also impossible that someone could capture something like the George Floyd murder on tape, that hundreds of thousands of protesters would fill American streets from coast to coast demanding justice…and then that nothing would meaningfully change. Years and years of Martin Luther King day articles and simplified retrospectives were very clear one the efficacy and efficiency of non-violent protest. Here’s how it works: lunch counter sit-ins, Montgomery bus boycott, Selma, then boom, civil rights; quick as you can say it. We flatter ourselves each year by imagining that MLK did not have to ask us very hard, that the boycotts and sit-ins and marches were symbolic and not brutal protracted campaigns, that only a handful of hateful racist freaks stood between MLK’s beautiful dream and our own beautiful post-racial reality.

Police reform and/or defunding was not a fringe issue in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s murder: only a handful of hateful racist freaks stood in defense of police brutality. Two-thirds of Americans wanted to end qualified immunity in June 2020. 78 percent believed the protests were either fully or somewhat justified. Our country is infamously polarized and divided and fractious but in that strange and terrible instant we came together as human beings who could not and would not tolerate the abomination of a man begging for his life on film, calling out for his mother while another man knelt on his neck, unmoved, and killed him.

A hundred fucking days, a hundred wasted goddamn nights and nothing ever changed. Minneapolis voted to defund the police, but Minneapolis police now have more money to spend than they had in 2020.  83 percent of cities in America spend more on police now than in 2020. We didn’t just fail to fix things. Things got worse.

Never again. We always say it and it’s always true but never the way we want it to be. Of course cops will murder Black people again, always and always again, but George Floyd’s on-camera murder, and the system’s complete indifference to it, are no longer impossible. It will never shock us again. We’ve seen this movie before.

Police are better at PR in post-Floyd America; within days of Keenan Anderson’s murder the LAPD released footage from four bodycams and a cell phone, complete with white female narrator to explain what happened before we see the footage.

NPR has a pretty good summary of what happened here, but it’s worth watching the footage if you have 20 extra minutes and a strong stomach. NPR doesn’t really capture how “erratic” (LAPD’s word) Anderson comes off during all these interactions, and unfortunately that matters.

The footage begins after some sort of major car accident involving Anderson, a BMW, and several other people, when the first police officer arrives. When Anderson flags down the officer, he says that someone at the scene of the accident is trying to kill him. He follows this statement up with something incoherent about a stunt, and losing the keys to his BMW, and someone trying to put stuff into the car to frame him. The officer asks for more details, and perhaps Anderson provided them and perhaps he did not but we will never know because the LAPD cuts the footage at this point.

We skip seven minutes ahead, to the point where – as a title screen helpfully informs us – Anderson “attempted to run away.” He does, in fact, attempt to run, but it’s a very strange and skittish attempt, disjointed, hesitant. The cop gets on his motorcycle, chases after him, orders him to the ground, onto his stomach. Anderson hesitates, keeps saying please. First sitting, then lying on his side. As the officer steps forward Anderson puts his hands up and the cops swarm him like an ant on a dying insect. A knee in Anderson’s back. He is still saying it, please please please. They’re trying to kill me, he says. “Keenan, relax” the officer says, the officer knows his name, they must have spoken more off camera but again, we’ll never know.

It is at this point in the footage, with one officer telling him to relax and two others crushing him to the ground to restrain him, that Anderson stops saying “please” and starts saying “help.”

The LAPD fades out that body camera and then transfers us to the bodycam of a different cop as he arrives as backup. We see the last part of the scene over again – please please they’re trying to kill me help – and then, just after “please” becomes “help,” our new POV cop says “Stop or I’ma tase you.”

Keenan Anderson is not making it easy for the cops at this point, he’s freaking out pretty hard. But the cops have him well under control, there’s three of them and one of Anderson, he’s not a flight risk and he’s in no position to hurt anybody. But what’s the point of a good taser if you can’t use it on a restrained suspect, anyway? Waste of taxpayer dollars, that’s what.

“C-Lo’s trying to kill me,” Anderson starts shouting, or at least that’s what the subtitle says. Anderson is screaming help and the cop keeps saying he’s going to tase Anderson, he tells Anderson to roll over but Anderson is not doing it and maybe that’s because two other cops are restraining him and maybe it’s because he’s scared out of his mind or maybe he’s just being ornery and obstinate what do I know but he’s restrained, he’s a handful but no danger to anyone. “Move your elbow partner” the cop says calmly to the other cop, and the other cop does.

“They’re trying to George Floyd me” Anderson shouts, voice hoarse, beyond terror. And that’s when the torture starts.

A taser is a machine designed to send electric current through a human body that is so painful that it utterly incapacitates its victim. We like to call it “non-lethal” but that’s an optimistic take: police can and do kill people with tasers all the time. 

The subtitle says *TASER* in green, while the cop’s speech renders in white text above it. *TASER* stands in for the nightmare electric clicking noise of this cop pumping 50,000 volts of electricity through Anderson’s thoroughly-restrained, now-dying body again, and again, and again. No subtitles are available for the noises Anderson makes. Traditionally, these kinds of sounds demarcate the boundaries of language.

The police handcuff Anderson and the tasing continues. The camera fades out.

We get another angle on the exact same scene. This time we hear and see Anderson shout “these are actors.” I suspect the point of this third POV is to establish that Anderson is crazy and also moving around quite a lot, but at no point is he breaking free, at no point is he doing anything but struggling fruitlessly against three large people actively restraining him. We get a good look at them putting handcuffs on Anderson before tasing him a few more times.

Time for a cell phone video. This video adds very little visually to what we already know – it is from a distance and captures the same thing as these last three videos, but less clearly. What’s important, though, is a voice-over from a bystander who claims Anderson was trying to steal his car, caused the accident, and that the cops are doing their jobs. “Don’t think that the police are abusing him. He was trying to, uh, go away,” the man says as the cops torture Anderson and Anderson screams. Maybe it’s OK that they’re doing this. After all, a guy we cannot see says he deserves it and that it isn’t abuse.

“I think that guy was in a very paranoid state,” another invisible bystander says.

“That’s a taser.”

“Yeah. They use it to tase him, right?”

“Ugh, now the bus is in the way.” The video ends.

We wrap up with one final bodycam which occurs at some unspecified time after the tasing is done. Officers are binding Anderson’s legs so he can’t move.

Anderson says the cops are actors. That the cops think he killed C-Lo. Officers are standing around. “They sedated me,” Anderson says several times, towards the end. I believe him. It explains a lot of the stuff he’s saying at this point.

The cops put him in an ambulance and the narrator explains that later, Anderson suffered a medical emergency, could not be resuscitated, and died at the hospital. 

The thing that sticks out most to me as I watch Keenan Anderson die is his abject terror.

The human body wants to live very badly. When we find ourselves in a dangerous situation, like a car accident, the body releases rivers of adrenaline so we can fight or flee. But our body does not know the precise nature or direction of that danger. The mind must figure out where the threat is coming from so the body can deal with it.

It is not hard to figure out what Anderson saw as the threat in his final hours on earth. When told to get up against the wall, Anderson instead dropped to his knees with his hands behind his head: a position that is more submissive and also more in line with the kinds of commands we often see on police brutality videos. Anderson did not want to be alone with a police officer away from public view and said so several times. When he moved away from the cop to run away he also moved towards people. The street. The sidewalk. Places where people might stop and look and maybe take a cell phone video if things got bad.

Adrenaline from the accident. Years of justified fear of police. Under such circumstances it would be shocking if Anderson managed to perfectly follow police instructions.

Keenan Anderson was a Black man in America. He was also the cousin of Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement. So Anderson knew, intimately, what kind of threat police pose to men who look like him. He knew that Black men are twice as likely to be shot by police as white men. He’d seen many Black men die at the hands of police on-screen.

Crucially, Anderson saw George Floyd die. He saw what happened afterwards, and what didn’t happen. The way Republicans doubled down on blue lives matter flags. The way Dems put all their kente cloth away and quietly increased police funding. 

When Keenan Anderson woke up on the morning of January 3rd, he knew the battle was over. He knew which side had lost.

Toxicology reports, already released by the LAPD, found both cocaine and cannabis metabolites in Anderson’s blood, which suggests that Anderson did those drugs sometime in the past few days. I’d be willing to bet half the people in LA had cocaine and cannabis metabolites in their blood three days after New Year’s, but it’s also possible he was high at the time of his arrest.

“I think that guy was in a very paranoid state,” that bystander said, and whether or not drugs were involved that bystander is correct.

Being in a very paranoid state is not a capital offense, at least not on paper. In practice, it sure can be. Two and a half years ago, when we were saying a lot of names and facing down police, a lot of those names we said were of people with mental illness. Schizophrenia. Addiction. Maybe a manic episode

There’s this horrible reaction we’ve all been taught to have, this knee-jerk response to drug use or mental illness: “Oh, that explains it.” It makes sense that someone was gunned down, or tased to death. It’s OK. They were out of their mind.

It is not OK. 

It does not matter, at all, whether Anderson’s challenging but non-threatening behavior came as a result of adrenaline, mental illness, drugs, or some combination of the three. What matters is that many – perhaps most – law enforcement interactions involve some combination of these factors. A system that answers this very common problem with “guess we’ll just kill them” is a system we must tear down.

Martin Luther King, as any child can tell you, had a dream. But that dream went well beyond children playing together or individuals judged only by the content of their character. 

King dreamed of class struggle. Had he lived, he would have continued to work towards a coalition of poor people across races that could push back against the economic inequality that condemned Black people and other disenfranchised groups to cycles of addiction and violence and misery. 

King dreamed of global solidarity. He stood with the people of Vietnam and in doing so lost almost every liberal friend he had. Civil rights were only the beginning of what he wanted to accomplish. The first of many hoped-for victories.

MLK’s dream was so big and we have made it so, so small.

Dreams are wonderful things, but you must wake up to make them come true. You must look around and see how different the waking world is from the one you see when you close your eyes.

Nine facts about MLK that might surprise you. Biden gives a speech, look how far we’ve come. A think-piece about how much MLK would hate Woke Cancel Culture. We shut our eyes tight in this country, we take ambien by the fistful, we will smash every clock we have for five more minutes asleep.

Happy MLK Day.

Please wake up.